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The only time you should ever be using MM/DD/YYYY is if you are talking to some legacy system that only understands that format, or if you are making content for users that you can be sure are Amercians.

And god help you if you ever try to use it to serialize dates into a file format.

The point is that reasonable people do MM/DD/YYYY, and reasonable people do DD/MM/YYYY, and there is no way to tell whether NN/NN/NNNN is one or the other just by looking at it. So you need to refer to an external authority, and deity help you if you have none. In contrast, no reasonable person does YYYY-DD-MM, so if you get NNNN-NN-NN you know how to interpret it just by looking at it. In that sense, it is better to always use NNNN-NN-NN because the format is self-documenting.

Because it makes one party to the perpetuation of a bad design. (And egregious ambiguity in data such as the DMY/MDY confusion is the worst kind of bad design there is.) Now we don’t always have a choice in what to implement (f.ex. when implementing a standard that prescribes the dumb choice), but that doesn’t make the design any better. (You might say it is well specified, but considering the consequences of moronity [diveintomark.org] and Ruby’s postulate [intertwingly.net] in tandem, that means the specification, however ri